The following was in "The Liberal" (a local area newspaper).
Taking talk to Text (headline)
Markham company becomes world player in digital recording
You speak, it types.
That's where Markham's Better Communication in Business Voice Systems (BCB) is taking digital recording technology.
"Translating speech to text is the holy grail," said Peter Vanderlee, President and chief operating officer of BCB.
"It's what they do in Star Trek, but people tend to forget that Star Trek was 300 years into the future."
Six years ago, BCB started as a niche player in the interactive voice response field, using touch-tone technology to create voice mail prompts.
Along the way, it developed a series of digital dictation and recording devices that are now used in the House of Commons and the Canadian Senate.
But the past six months have proved to be the most interesting yet for the 40-employee firm, after BCB lined up 16 investors , representing an additional $5 million in capital.
Powerhouse partners include Flanders Language Valley, a Belgium mutual fund company specializing in voice and sound systems, and Data General, a $1.5-billion U.S. data storage conglomerate.
BCB has now teamed with Belgium's Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, one of four players in the highly competitive continuous speech recognition technology field.
Battling against the likes of IBM, Phillips and Dragon Systems, Lernout & Hauspie's Voice Xpress software enables users to talk into a headset and have their speech automatically translated into a computer text file.
Voice commands will prompt the software to perform additional duties such as font changes, bold text, highlight words and rearrange paragraphs.
To help market the voice Xpress software, BCB entered a marketing alliance with UHER Informatik, a leading German manufacturer of audio recording technology, whose products include digital hand-held recorders and multi-channel sound cards that utilize voice compression.
The deal gives BCB exclusive rights to distribute UHER digital products throughout North America, while co-operation on future product development such as speech processing and recognition applications.
"There is now a real case to be make for the replacement of analog tapes," said Vanderlee. "A plethora of opportunities will open up for us as more recordings are done on a digital format.
"These were all original visions of the company, we just couldn't do everything we wanted working on only hardware. The big benefit with software is its greater margins."
BCB's growing reputation was further enhanced when Microsoft lent a hand with a formal introduction to Lernout & Hauspie, having already invested $45 million in the Belgian firm.
Avery Wislesky, a 17-year veteran in the financial advisory field, was so impressed with BCB that he became the company's new product manager.
And senior vice-president Leo Halpern said the rapid changes have taken BCB from a niche player to a $300-million large-scale operation.
"The key now is to compete in the U.S. market. They are our closest neighbours and we need to crack that market", said Halpern.
.......End of article.
My only question is regarding the "$300 million large-scale operation" comment. Is this accurate?
Thanks |
